Thomas Jefferson: Presidential or Prophetic?

In Corey Brettschneider's The Presidents and The People, he argues that the Constitution's allowance for centralized executive power has facilitated a cyclical pattern of crisis and recovery. In his introduction, he outlines how American history has revealed a continual pattern of rights being breached by Presidents, and subsequently rehabilitated by those who follow. Given his patterned framework, it should come as no surprise that statements from former presidents can seem remarkably pertinent even today. In Chapter 2 specifically, I found parallels between President Thomas Jefferson's qualms with the structure of government and issues relevant to today's political landscape. For instance, Brettschneider states:

    "Jefferson later argued that of courts alone were trusted as the sole interpreters of constitutional rights,         they called mold those rights like “wax“ into whatever they wished. Overtime, the guarantees of the         document would be left, meaningless, mangled and remangled by generations of unelected judges"             (48). 

Given our previous reading of Scalia, and the lack of popularity of some of the Supreme Court's recent decisions in the circles I inhabit, I was curious to what extent modern Americans might agree or disagree with Jefferson's qualm. The kind of "mangling" Jefferson fears might be compared with the broken field running approach to constitutional interpretation.

Polarization is a critical issue in our country today — and yet Brettschneider outlines how Jefferson sought to address it during his Inauguration in 1801:

        "Federalists and Democratic Republicans alike, he argued, while bitterly divided, should rise above             partisanship to see commonality among all citizens and recognition of the fundamentality of the                 constitution, a higher loyalty here articulated in the speech is famous, stirring call. “We have called             by different names, brethren of the same principle,” Jefferson announced. “We are all Republicans;             we are all federalists.“ (56)

Yet I wonder to what extent Democrats and Republicans today can recognize the fundamentality of the Constitution in the same way Jefferson claimed they could in 1801. Given that some liberal judges are said to subscribe to a more "living constitutionalist" approach, while some conservative judges claim to follow in Scalia's textualist footsteps — or simply make the case for eliminating birthright citizenship using a broken field running approach — are they actually still brethren of the same principle? Does Jefferson's speech imply that differences in constitutional interpretation can fuel polarization, and to what extent can some approaches "mangle" constitutional rights in the way he feared?

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